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A desperate and largely unknown humanitarian crisis is deteriorating in the Lake Chad Basin region of West Africa, forcing millions of people to flee their homes and leaving millions more in need of humanitarian assistance. Oxfam is providing life-saving support but help is urgently needed to prevent the crisis turning into a catastrophe.

Since January 2015 more than 1 million women and men fleeing war, persecution, natural disasters and poverty entered or passed through Greece in search of safety and a better life. We are working in Athens, Lesvos island and the Epirus region of North-West Greece responding to the urgent needs of people arriving. Support our work.

Did you know that 90% of Africa’s rural land is undocumented, leaving rural communities vulnerable to land-grabbing? It's a matter of human rights. It's their land. Join our collective effort to make a difference not just for Indigenous Peoples and local communities but for the health of the environment and ending poverty and inequality.

Every year, the gap between rich and poor gets even wider – and it’s being fuelled by the use of tax havens. Today, 62 individuals have the same wealth as the poorest half the people on our planet. It is time to bring an end to inequality. It is time to Even it up!

Two years of extended fighting has forced thousands of people to seek refuge in Nyal and the islands surrounding it. Many must regularly walk long distances alone in search of aid and food. We are assisting them to access free and safe travel by training canoe operators and distributing vouchers for transport.

For 40 years, the Quechua communities in Peru have lived with contaminated rivers, and poor health as a result of oil drilling. Teddy Guerra is leading the effort to obtain integral land rights for his community before any more concessions are given to oil companies. Read his story and sign the petition.

Millions of people are being forced to flee their homes, risking everything to escape conflict, disaster, poverty or hunger. We are working in nine of the ten top refugee source countries as well as in refugee host countries. We urgently need your help to reach people in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and in Europe.

With no end in sight to the conflict in Syria, hundreds of thousands of people are living in desperate conditions and exposed to continuing violence. Today, half the pre-conflict population of 22 million Syrians have fled their homes and more than 13.5 million people urgently need your help.

The conflict in Syria has created a humanitarian crisis, with more than two million people having fled to neighboring countries in the hope of escaping the violence. Thousands of Syrian refugees continue to enter Lebanon each week, putting pressure on host communities and exhausting their capacity to provide support. The situation has created intense levels of stress for refugees, as they are forced to take on new responsibilities at odds with their traditional gendered social roles.

In order to understand these changing roles, Oxfam and the ABAAD-Resource Center for Gender Equality conducted a gender situation and vulnerability assessment among Syrian refugees and Palestinian refugees from Syria now living in Lebanon. The findings and analysis are presented in this report, which aims to contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the gendered impact of the Syrian conflict on refugees now in Lebanon.

The report concludes with detailed recommendations for development and humanitarian practitioners and donor agencies, to help them design and implement gender-sensitive programming that addresses these shifting gender roles and helps to minimize stress and tensions among refugee populations (at individual, household and community levels) and between refugee and host communities.

Key recommendations

The research findings indicate that humanitarian organizations need a clear organizational commitment to promoting gender equality, which must be embedded into all aspects of programming:

Gender and social analysis must be conducted as part of all emergency responses.

Sex and age-disaggregated data should be collected, analyzed and used in planning and implementation of aid projects.

Refugee women and men’s anxieties and fears about their changing gender roles need to be acknowledged and addressed.

Program design should utilize refugees’ existing skills and capacities, as well as meeting their needs. Access to income-generating programs and other benefits and assistance should be equally available to women and men.

Donors need to hold implementing agencies accountable for delivery of programs that are gender sensitive. Mechanisms should be in place so that feedback from women and men, and boys and girls, is channelled in the right direction and responded to promptly.

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